All four of these articles are worth reading. I have a massive amount of respect for Doug Brinkley, and my own view of Bush's presidency lies somewhere between that of him and Prof. Foner. I don't know that Bush will be seen, come the end of his presidency, as the worst president in American history, but he'll be pretty damned close.

Greenberg's piece of tripe is laughable, comparing Bush to Nixon and finding Nixon the worser on all counts. He points out the laws Nixon broke, without mentioning that the very existence of the Iraq War is illegal per the War Crimes Act of 1996. This makes Bush a war criminal. Nixon was a cheap thug. The difference is huge, and not in favor of Nixon being the worst ever.

But Cannato's point that we should wait until the end of Bush's presidency to measure the man is well-taken, despite the writer's deference to our blood-drenched Commander-in-Chief. The winners write the history books. James K. Polk would be a savage war criminal who killed Americans in an unnecessary war of aggression, if we had lost the Mexican-American War. Whether Bush is a Polk or a ... hmmm ... nope, can't think of any president to compare him to if Iraq continues to be a shambles. With his disastrous domestic policies, Katrina, the trampling of civil liberties (Yes, I said "trampling of civil liberties," Cannato, you toadie.), et. al., if this Iraq thing goes all the way south, Eric Foner will be right. Bush will be enshrined in the Halls of Stupid forever -- right up there with Worst Movie Ever, 2006's Zoom! (recently supplanting Bio-Dome); Worst Album Ever, 2006's Playing With Fire by Kevin Federline (recently supplanting Phil Collins' Testify); and Worst Bet Ever, made by me on Sunday.

Which brings me to my next point, the $100 I now owe my fiancee for betting that Florida wouldn't make it into the National Championship. (As an aside to that last point, though, it really says something that my picks for worst album and movie ever both come from 2006. I don't know what it says, but I don't like it).

I gave that woman 10-to-1 odds on $10 as the BCS show came on Sunday night, then rubbed my palms in eager anticipation. Now, I've learned to love the Gators, dating a Florida alum as I do, but given the point differential between Michigan and Florida going into Florida's SEC Championship against Arkansas Saturday, there was just no way that the computers would let it slide. And I was right, in that sense. The computers didn't put Florida above Michigan. But the pollsters sure did, and although it was a razor-thin margin, it was enough to put Florida over the edge and into the Big Dance.

GO GATORS!!!!!!!

My fiancee plopped into my lap, leered cruelly and taunted me, but it was the best $100 I ever lost, and I'll never doubt again. The Gainesville Sun has the story -- as do many others, of course, but I thought the Sun to be the most fitting to link to. When/if the Florida Gators beat Ohio State on January 8, they will have the reigning college championship football and basketball teams -- anyone know if that's ever been done before? I can't think of an example off the top of my head. If it has, I'm sure it's been damn few times.

Monday, we learned of the now infamous Rumsfeld Memo, in which the outgoing Secretary of Defense called for troop withdrawals not long before his departure. My first thought is that the memo is an intentional leak by the administration, and it will be used to justify the administration's coming flip-flop, in which it begins to pull troops out of Iraq after word comes down from the Iraq Study Group on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Sentinel carried a large feature titled Are Most White Americans Racist?. It's the sort of feature that could only come from a white society, and likely from a white writer. The answer is, after all, easy -- "YES!" -- the rest of the article is simply white guilt and navel-gazing. The article is correct in one thing, though -- racism is deeply ingrained, and from a very early age. It's not enough to say to someone that they have racist views -- if they believe that those views are correct, then what do they care? Better racist and right, than tolerant and wrong. As a result, any time the Sun-Sentinel has a crime story, you'll see a hundred posted comments on that story's Internet page, nearly all of them decrying these vicious blacks and celebrating if the cops took one out.

One can imagine, then, the flurry of commentary caused by this article -- more than 400 posts as I type this. Most of it is, obviously, hateful and racist to the core. Everyone has their prejudices, of course, but these sort of broad-brush assumptions about entire races are breathtaking in their ignorance. The most comic comment, though, is not the most racist, nor the most ugly, nor the ones typed in all-caps with multiple spelling and grammar errors. No, it's one of the first comments on the first comment page, and it starts with this "No, I am white, have been all my life ..." Brilliant. Thank you, "rick-fll," for brightening my day.

Anyway, if you want a lesson in just how racist white America really is, don't bother with the story. Read the comment section. It's a lesson in dumb. That said, there is actually a great argument about the hows and whys of racism, the deeply rooted problems of both the black and the white communities, and the miscommunication between the two going on there. You've just got to hunt through the trash to find it.

And finally, in this already far-too-lengthy post, a good night to John Bolton, the greatest moustache in politics. Salon.com has already excoriated Bolton, and deservedly so, so I'll just say, read the article. Bolton was, if I recall correctly, the last of Bush's appointees in which the president put an appointee in charge of something that the appointee wanted to destroy. Most of them were shamed out of office after Bush's first term. So good night, John, you savage dupe, you hung on longer than the rest, and you deserved to be dropped far more. At last, it has come to pass.

John Bolton, our U.N. Ambassador, who hated the U.N.